Obama drops rule aimed at immigrants' bosses

Employment

Published 4:00 am, Friday, October 9, 2009

The Obama administration has repealed a rule that would have threatened employers with prosecution unless they fired workers whose Social Security numbers did not match entries in a government database, ending a two-year battle in a San Francisco federal court.

Although the Department of Homeland Security formally withdrew the "no-match" rule Wednesday, the administration is supporting another program enabling employers to check workers' names against electronic records that are supposed to screen out illegal immigrants.

That program, E-Verify, is voluntary for most employers but mandatory for the 170,000 companies holding federal contracts and for their subcontractors. This week, a House-Senate conference committee voted to extend E-Verify for three years.

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"E-Verify has many of the same problems as no-match," said Chris Calabrese, legislative attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which took part in the San Francisco lawsuit. Although employers are not threatened with prosecution under the program, he said, thousands of workers are in danger of losing their jobs based on "databases that are not terribly accurate."

But the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports restrictions on immigration, said the government has found that E-Verify is accurate in 99.6 percent of cases. The group criticized the House-Senate conference committee for refusing to make the program permanent.

The three-year extension is "further evidence of the Obama administration's and the congressional leadership's effort to raise a smokescreen while it dismantles all effective controls against illegal immigration," the organization said.

President George W. Bush's administration proposed the no-match rule in 2007, saying it would add teeth to a 1986 law that prohibited businesses from knowingly employing illegal immigrants.

The rule would have given employees three months to clear up any differences between the Social Security numbers they gave to employers and the numbers in the Social Security Administration database. After that, an employer who failed to fire the worker would be subject to civil fines and criminal prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction against the rule in October 2007, before it took effect. He said opponents had raised serious questions about whether the 1986 law authorized the no-match system, and that the government had failed to explain its reversal of a decade-old policy of merely notifying employers about discrepancies in Social Security records.

The Bush administration submitted a new explanation for the rule and asked Breyer to revive it, a request that was still pending when Bush left office in January.

Opponents applauded the Obama administration's decision to drop the rule.

"The no-match program was a flawed and ineffective enforcement tool that would have hurt U.S. citizens and other authorized workers," said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.